Not a Clone: a satire on the mobile game market

Howdy, all. We're Omiya Games, a small studio working on Not a Clone, an app store parody where you play all the games! Not a Clone is a Wario Ware Inc.-style minigame series where you play a lot of mobile games in quick successions. The original game was developed for the PC, but it was popular enough to warrant a mobile release. We're still very early in development (as you can probably tell from the placeholder Kenny art assets and Kevin Macleod's music), so any feedback is much appreciated!

Quote:What if you were given a backdoor pass to a site filled with the hottest mobile games currently climbing the charts? What if just by playing the games well enough, you were able to earn money to buy even more games? Would you jump at the chance or just let it pass?

Not A Clone is a frantic exercise in quick-thinking and even quicker responding. Featuring over two dozen original and parody mini-games, you must play through them one after another, chaining your successes into the highest score possible for possible fame and prizes. Beat your friends to the top of the leaderboards! Earn Zeni to purchase more games!

You have five seconds to get through each mini-game that is thrown at you by following the instructions that appear on the screen. The further you go, the harder it gets. How long will you last before your device runs out of power? Will you earn enough to unlock your next challenge? Will you know which games are being parodies and which games are not a clone?

I'm going to do my best to give some highlights to other features implemented in the game so that other team members can get their spotlight, too. First, Dylan put together a translation interface that reads in a spreadsheet like the one below:

And turns it into texts that changes based on the player's language settings. Since we're early in development, there haven't been any translations outside of Pig Latin.Still, when we do finalize every texts in the game, we should be able to translate the game to other languages very quickly. Here's to hoping the next update will come quickly (without E3 bothering us).

As mentioned on Twitter, last weekend, many of our teammates were responsible for putting together the River Jam game jam. We weren't able to post any updates on our project back then.

During the same week, our team had an emergency discussion about the difficulty of navigating the Game Over screen. As you may recall, the old game over screen looked like this:

Back then, we wanted to hammer the idea that the minigames they were playing were clones of other mobile games. From the feedback we received, though, it seems we made the menus too obtuse. As such, we've redesigned the menu to make it easier to get back into the game:

What do you think?

Incidentally, one major change we're working on in Not a Clone is adding difficulty levels. For example, if you just started the game, and played the Angry Monkeys minigame, this is how many fruits you need to hit:

As you clear more minigames, the number of fruits will keep increasing:

Until it fills up the whole screen:

This effort is courtesy of Taro Omiya, who was compelled to address himself in third-person. While this feature is still a work-in-progress, it should be pretty clear how this improves on the original game.

Continuing our updates on Not a Clone's progress, we've got a new mockup for a minigame:

Art, again, is courtesy of Astra Wijaya.

In regards to other updates, there's been a few small tweaks to the UI. For example, the loading screen now provides the definition of a clone:

A lot of people who play-tested our game didn't know what a clone was, so we put the definition up on the loading screen to educate our players. Second, the game over screen now provides some fascinating (or depressing) facts about clone-related practices:

This week's Dev Log update on Not a Clone isn't graphical, but rather, auditory. Specifically, this week's update is on the sound effects that plays within the game's menus. The video below demonstrates the changes made to the auditory experience of the game (background music* has yet to change, though).

Full credit goes to Chase Bethea for putting together these sounds so quickly.

One other fine-tuning worth mentioning: we've made Disco Hexagon and other similar minigames easier to play by making the controls and obstacle placement more obvious to the player:

In comparison, here's a screenshot to the older, more cryptic game, which immediately had the walls converge into the middle at the start of the game:

We hope this change provides a much more pleasant experience to the player.

We return to our regular program of Not a Clone updates with two animations: Darumaman and Totemman minigames!

These will take place of Fungusman and Slapperman from the old Not a Clone build. Thanks again to Astra Wijaya for the graphical improvements.

A while ago, we mentioned we were adding difficulty levels to each minigame. Here are a few more changes that can occur on each minigame.

The minigames 2 and 10 now increases the number of tiles the game starts with as the difficulty increases. It was a bit difficult for our programmer, Taro Omiya to put together, but we’ve managed to make all the puzzles the minigame generates to be solvable:

Likewise, Colors! and Neons! got a similar treatment.

We’ll provide more updates as we go along on how other minigames changes as the difficulty increases.

Hello, everyone! This month, we'll be in a bit of a hiatus because we will be volunteering on teaching kids how to make games throughout this summer. We should be back in normal schedule starting September.

Fortunately, we do have some updates this week! The first is the usual Astra Wijaya graphic updates, this time on Flappy Fly into Flappy Comic:

Much more cooler, however, is that we're now creating new minigames as well! So far, we have two previews. Let's see if you can guess how they play:

Hello, everyone. We don't have any graphical updates this week, but we are making some progress on developing Not a Clone. Namely on the feedback we've received during regular playtesting. Basically, we've listened to criticisms that our game, both in its current form and the original PC version, are difficult to get into due to the minigames' complexity. Additionally, a few pointed out that the satire behind the game wasn't very obvious or critical. Our team has been hard at work coming up with a design to resolve both issues, and we've finally resolved on our answer.

We'll be making a (fictional) app store to unlock more minigames.

Our plan is to start with a limited number of minigames which would be easier for beginners to play. Most of these will be original games. You'll earn currency depending on your score at the end of the game, allowing you to buy games from the app store. Except...most of them are clones!

As of now, we're still in designing phases, so it'll seem like there's no progress being made for a while. Rest assured we're working as hard as possible![Cross-posted from Omiya Games]

Due to the artist's brief vacation and the programmer currently sick, as well as a brief break to join the Local History Game Jam last weekend, progress on Not a Clone is a bit slow. Despite his sickness, though, our programmer went ahead and tried to put together some changes together. Excuse the terrible artwork and composition.

First off the Game Over screen has been simplified to combine the quips, list of clones, and original minigames into a single results panel. Leaderboards still remains as a separate panel that can be revealed by swiping. We hope this reduces any confusions in the game. Also visible as a brief preview is a hint button to reveal more information on each minigame.

The proposed shop to buy and unlock minigames is being implemented as well. Currently, it'll look like this:

Hopefully with more development, we can go into more detail with this new menu.

After a long brainstorming discussions, we're ready to get started on creating the menus for the minigame store, minigame list, and options. Many thanks to Astra Wijaya for putting these clean mock-ups together! To start with, the mockup below has two menus shown: the left menu is the minigame store listing the available options. Unlocking a minigame is as easy as tapping the buy button, which lists the price of the minigame. If one wants to know about more details on each entry, they can tap on the icon or name of the minigame to open the left, which provides the description of the game as well as how to play it:

Also new is a menu devoted to listing all the minigames you've unlocked so far. By tapping on the info icon, not only will the description of the game be displayed, but also how to play the game, what the game is a clone of (if any), and even a button that lets the player practice the minigame safely.

Lastly, the options menu. This mockup below is, admittedly, a bit incomplete as we're still discussing what features we have left to add in the game. Regardless, a few settings were important enough to make it to this mockup, including audio configuration, changing language, displaying the leaderboard and achievements, credits, and so forth.

We should have more to show in the future as implement these mockups in the game.

The Top Charts menu allows one to unlock minigames via in-game currency.

Games menu displays what’s been unlocked.

Selecting a minigame in the Games menu and Top Charts brings up this dialog, the Details menu. New to this update is Practice Mode, a mode that lets you practice a specific minigame. There’s no scores or penalties recorded during Practice Mode, so it should provide a safe environment to learn and improve on approaching a tough minigame.

Also, excuse the typo on the description and instructions on the game. It’s obviously a work-in-progress.

Lastly, the list of options. Again, all the settings displayed above aren’t final.

Last time, we hinted that Astra Wijaya had some new updates to show off. This week, we’ve got some GIFs to cover those updates!

In other news, we were hard at work submitting to the MAGFest Indie Video Game Showcase these few weeks, so if it sounded like we disappeared again, it’s actually due to tight deadlines and upcoming holidays that’s been breaking up our update schedule. Still, we can say with confidence that since our commitment to simplify and lengthen the game, Not a Clone has been drastically improving. While playtesting from a few months ago resulted in a lot of confusion, our local demonstration this month at the Rensselaer Game Showcase and TVGS’ monthly Interactive Showcase were exceedingly positive. We still have a lot of work left to do, but we can assure with the latest feedback that the game will be much more fun than the original prototype!

We're adding a new feature to Not a Clone this week! Courtesy of programmer, Taro Omiya, Challenge is a new mode that occurs every 10 apps. For one single app, the difficulty dramatically increases:

The reward, as the animation above implies, is replenishing one life!

But what if you already have all 4 lives? No worries! In fact, life up is just one of the rewards. The other, which occurs much more often if you have more lives, is increasing the score by a drastic amount (4!).

So what happens if you lose to challenge mode? Simple: you lose one life, just like the other apps, and lose the opportunity to take the challenge again for 10 more games. Of course, we'll be play-testing this feature extensively, so a lot of these details are subject to change.